Moving Times

I recently spent several hours hopping between my desk and the consoles of a number of computer systems running different operating systems (Solaris, Linux and Windows to be precise). I hadn’t yet configured remote access on these machines, hence the need to sit at the console.

Anyway, a rather curious observation was that the time on these systems was located in completely different areas. On Windows, it defaults to the bottom-right corner, Solaris defaults to the bottom-left corner and Ubuntu defaults to the upper-right corner. As I quite often don’t wear a watch, I found my eyes playing a game of Boggle every time I wanted to check the current time, a very strange experience.

Naturally, I presume I could have reconfigured the desktop(s) to show the time in the same place but it’s still interesting to wonder if this was a deliberate move on the part of each operating system vendor.